Thoughts after reading the news"Chinese flood Barack Obama’s Google Plus page — because they can"

The web page of President Barack Obama's re-election campaign on Google Inc.'s social networking service was  flooded with comments from Chinese internet surfers. According to the news(http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/1137409--chinese-flood-barack-obama-s-google-plus-page-because-they-can), the Chinese surfers launched an activity that "Occupy Obama" to fill Barack Obama's page with Chinese comments, which mostly are for fun.  How can the president's Google+ page be flooded so easily?  According to the CIA fact book, China has almost 400 millions internet user, which almost doubled the number of united states. Moreover, the number of Chinese users almost equal to the sum of the top 2 to top 4 countries(US, Japan,and Brazil) that have the most internet users. The number of Chinese internet users is still expected to grow fast, because China has the greatest population in the world while having a decent economic growth. While the flood of president Obama's page a bad example of the use of Chinese internet power, the potential of Chinese internet market is undoubtedly the biggest on this planet. This is very exciting especially for the computer science future graduates because we have such a great place full of opportunities. In China, the internet already created a lot of billionaires. Jack Ma, 1.1 billion Us at age of 44, is the founder Alibaba, similar to Ebay. Ding Lei, 15.8 billion US at age of 37, is the founder of Tencent. Robin Li, 17.59 billion US at age of 40, is the founder of Baidu, similar to google. In the next 10 years at least, the internet is going to be double or even triple.  In another words, opportunities is still plenty there.

Is Apple trying to market its new i-products by media hype

Ipad 3 just came out at March 7th, but I supposed that we have already been blasted by tons of varies rumors, such as "Both the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S currently provide 512 MB of RAM, which may increase as a result of the inclusion of the new chip.(http://touchreviews.net/ipad-3-release-date-rumors-dual-core-a5x-lte-3g-models/) " This certainly suggests that i-products are very popular, so that there are many Apple fans like to know about the next good. However, could some of the Apple rumors be directed by the Apple itself to market its new products? Some of rumors seem to suggest this.

Some time before the release of iphone 4, a news report says that the apple engineer, Gray Powell, lost his unreleased iphone 4 prototype in a bar.  A number of "classified" pictures was leaked out.  The Apple later admitted that the leaked phones are truly real while claiming the company has a good security system.  The leaked was suspicious because the owner of the iphone never came out to explain why he brings a unreleased i-phone to a bar.  It is highly unlikely that he did it to show it off to his friends.  Nevertheless, one thing is for certain.  That is people are reminded that iphone 4 is going to be released.  

If you try to search the key word "apple leak", you would be surprise that there are 50,100,000 results.  There is even a dedicated website called "Apple Leak"(appleleak.wordpress.com/).  It is suspicious that Apple is imitating celebrities. It taking advantage of the curiosity to create an effect that makes customers eagerly "sought after" the new i-products.

MegaUpload Closed down

 Recently, the famous data sharing website megaupload got shut down by the federal government. The owner Kim Dotcom and other company executives were arrested as well.  This is really bad news for a lot of people including myself. I used to download new movies that just hit the theatre from the site for free of charge, and the speed was quite impressive. Although the movie’s quality was extremely bad, but it doesn’t really bother me because I was more curious about the movie’s content.  On the other hand, I totally understand there is serious violation of other’s copyrights involved in such actions, but I always persuade myself that I was only one of the millions who are doing the same thing right now to reduce my feeling of guiltiness. It turns out due to the shut down incident, many other anonymous hackers attacked the government’s website.  The website’s intended legal use was to share large files that couldn’t be sent via email such as wedding videos etc. across the globe. There was even a song called ”Maga Song” performed by will.i.am., P. Diddy, Kanye West, Chris Brown, and Kim Kardashian. This even surprised me that a supposedly illegal website was gaining so much support from well-known celebrities before it got shut down.

The topic of copyrights and privacy on the Internet has been talked about for a long time. In my opinion, I think violation of copyrights is almost impossible to be eliminated.  Even if users and organizations are imposed, the process of the movie company to sue to each individual website for illegally distributing its content would take time and effort. The cost hiring lawyers, suing them would also cost a fortune. Furthermore, for Internet content provider to sign legal documents with each of the original creator of the content would be complicated, not economically viable if the website has a lot of information.  And it even slows down the speed of broadcasting of the content which is suppose to be the number one advantage of internet – speed. Therefore, to protect the rights of the creators and to preserve the effectiveness of internet, I think both the creator and the end user need to sacrifice a little bit and find their balance point.